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.COM 25 Pop Tarts All the girls chase the suave butch racecar driver Haruka, but she is faithful to her beautiful psychic girlfriend Michiru with the long green hair. They wear rings to signify their bond and together they raise their adopted daughter Hotaru. No, this isn’t the plotline of a Japanese version of The L Word – these gals are children’s superheroes from the internationally famous Sailor Moon meta-series. Haruka/Sailor Uranus and Michiru/Sailor Neptune are two of the lead characters in Sailor Moon manga, animae, and musical theatre. The characters are so well received in Japan that, in Seramyu, the long-running Sailor Moon musicals, the actresses who play Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus kiss live onstage, and have been doing so for almost a decade! Neptune and Uranus were introduced in the third season of Sailor Moon, soon after their first appearance in the manga in the early 1990s. The English language versions of the third season and fourth seasons (Sailor Moon S and Sailor Moon Super S) took many years to be translated into English, due to fruitless attempts to tone down the lesbian content – rather blatant innuendo, suggestive comments, and meaningful looks between Uranus and Neptune. The censored versions were ridiculous with the English dub translating the lovers as cousins (kissing cousins that is!) and the Italian version trying to pretend they were just best friends (very, very close). Thankfully, no such prudery was found in the Spanish dub, which stuck true to the original dialogue and relationship, even taking the trouble to translate all the double entendres. Even though dubious dubs tried to erase the love between Uranus and Neptune, their romance shines through in a very wholesome way, with lots of sweet and hilarious flirting, and plenty of silly jokes as their relationship progressively becomes more intimate. To dispel any ambiguity due to multiple translations, Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi emphatically told the San Diego Comic convention that, yes, Michiru/Neptune and Haruka/Uranus are definitely lesbians and that all fan rumours about Haruka being a man, the reincarnation of one, or a hermaphrodite, are untrue. In Naoko Takeuchi’s original manga, Haruka/Uranus was drawn very butch and androgynous in keeping with the style of Yuri, a genre of Japanese lesbian manga. Takeuchi also based Sailors Uranus and Neptune on the very popular male impersonator actresses of the Takarazuka Revue. The all-female company was founded in 1911, and the majority of their fans are women. The actresses who play the male roles cut their hair short and adopt a male persona from their second year of training. Takeuchi creates even more gender fluidity in the (as yet un-translated) fifth season of Sailor Moon, where the transgender Sailor Starlights are introduced. In Takeuchi’s original manga version the female Sailor Starlights cross dress as males in a ‘boy band’ as their secret identity on Earth. However, in the animae version the Starlights live in male bodies while on Earth and only transform into women to do their superhero Sailor stuff. In both versions the Starlights have relationships with other women. No doubt the censors will have fun trying to translate that for children’s morning cartoons. In the mid-nineties, during the boom in Sailor Moon merchandising in the West, the media all but missed the homosexual relationship between the male villains Zoisite and Kunzite in the first season, because in the English version of Sailor Moon Kunzite becomes Malachite, a woman with an extremely flat chest. However, nobody was fooled with the recent dubbing attempts to make Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune look platonic, because no matter how you try to translate it – these Sailors are Sapphic! Sailor Moon S: The Complete Uncut TV Set, Sailor Moon Super S: The Complete Uncut TV Set, & Sailor Moon: The Movies Dream Boxed Set are now out on DVD. HELLO SAILOR! EVELYN HARTOGH CELEBRATES THE LESBIAN CHARACTERS IN SAILOR MOON. The cast of Sailor Moon; and animator Naoko Takeuchi